The latest in our super-popular Weekly Workout series explores drop two chord arpeggios. You'll work through a variety of chord types using diatonic chords of major and melodic minor scales, all the while getting a comprehensive workout for the fretting and picking hands.

One of the biggest annual East Coast conferences aimed at folk music professionals will take place at the scenic Montreat Conference Center, 20 minutes northeast of Asheville, North Carolina, May 15-17. The four-day affair, put on by the Southeast Regional Folk Alliance (SERFA), offers performances, informative panels, instructional workshops, and keynote speakers in an attempt to, in the words of SERFA president Kim Richardson, “bring together this community of music-minded folks and provide the space and time to connect and re-energize together—to ask questions, share lessons learned, and inspire one another—not to mention, to play a ton of music in this stunning setting.”

For the past two years, the WinterWonderGrass festival has delighted bluegrass fans in Colorado with its eclectic lineups and picture-perfect location in the Vail Valley. For 2015, WWG has announced an inaugural California event to be held at Squaw Valley in the Lake Tahoe area.

Acoustic-guitar luminaries from across the musical spectrum will be performing at the third annual Guitar Mash benefit show, to be held at New York’s City Winery on November 16. David Bromberg, Punch Brothers’ Chris Eldridge, Valerie June, and Chilean folk-rock wizard Nano Stern are among the top-notch musicians scheduled to appear.

Back in 1989, Hot Rize took the stage at a festival in North Carolina. The quartet, founded in Colorado just over ten years earlier, was one of the top bands on the bluegrass circuit, winning over traditionalists and newgrass fans alike with a fresh mix of old tunes and originals, sweet circle-around-the-mic vocal harmonies, and tight instrumental interplay. The guys did comedy too: for a portion of their festival set, Hot Rize transformed into the tackily dressed, wisecracking country-western group Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers.

Tony Rice’s 1935 Martin D-28 herringbone (serial number: 58957) is, quite simply, one of the most famous guitars in the world. Once belonging to Clarence White, one of Rice’s heroes, the modified dreadnought has achieved mythic status for its clarity and projection.

If you happen to find yourself in Berlin this November and consider yourself a guitar enthusiast, you ought to make your way over to the Holy Grail Guitar Show. The inaugural event will be held on November 15 and 16 at the Estrel Hotel and Convention Center, and it will feature more than 100 of the world’s top guitar makers.

The Mandolin Café website is reporting that Stan Jay, owner of Mandolin Brothers instrument shop in Staten Island, New York, has been diagnosed with lymphoma. For more than 40 years, Jay’s beloved shop has been an institution, one of the world’s foremost purveyors of vintage instruments.

Whether playing a handful of fancy chords or a few single-note runs, Blueridge’s new BR-65KCE feels uncommonly responsive for an imported, mid-priced guitar, and the balance among the bass, middle, and treble regions is impressive. Perhaps owing to its koa build, the guitar has a warm and lovely voice, the notes ringing true and clear up and down the fretboard.

In late May, the acoustic-blues and folk singer Otis Taylor was hanging out at Immersive Studios in Boulder, Colorado, working on some new songs, when he ran into Bill Nershi, the guitarist for String Cheese Incident. The two got to talking about their instruments.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival organizers have been hardly strictly forthcoming about the lineup for the October 3 to 5 event in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. But as acts have slowly been teased on the festival website—via a name-that-tune guessing game—the lineup is starting to solidify.

NASHVILLE, TENN.—Walk down Lower Broadway in this storied southern city on pretty much any afternoon and you’ll hear acoustic guitars and pedal-steel spilling out of Tootsies and other famous clubs along the city’s legendary strip. But if you’re in town for the Summer NAMM Show, the cacophony of new guitars and gear blasting from the massive new Music City Center nearby almost drowns out the twang.

So much classic music has been made on a Gibson J-45. Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, and John Lennon are just a few of the greats who have relied on this workhorse of a guitar, with its taut bass and overall warmth, not to mention its receptiveness to both forceful strumming and delicate fingerpicking. Gibson recently introduced a pair of curious variations on the J-45—the J-15 and J-29—swapping out walnut and rosewood bodies, respectively, for the traditional mahogany.